Prologue
Then
I was given a choice about attending the funeral, and I wrestled with the decision the entire week until the date crept up on me. Funerals were for closure, for saying goodbye, for celebrating someone’s life, their journey and all they had achieved.
But Danny died when he was seventeen. What had he really achieved? How could I celebrate such a short life? And how could I say goodbye when I never wanted to let him go?
He shouldn’t have gone diving. I should have stopped him. He was fiercely independent, like me, but I could have hung onto his legs or bitten his arm or something. Something to make him stay.
It was my fault he was dead.
How could I live with that?
But what if I came to regret not saying goodbye? What if this was my chance to apologize? To tell him I loved him, to ask him for forgiveness?
I dressed in a plain black skirt with the white blouse I’d worn for my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary and a pair of dark Mary-Janes. Mom’s pale fingers wrapped an elastic in my hair. Green. Danny’s favorite color. I fiddled with my tights, hitching them up, only to pull them back down, not able to get comfortable in my clothes.
A friend of the family drove us to the funeral. No one spoke in the car. Outside, the winter day was stark and miserable. A perfect day for a funeral.
At the church, I didn’t listen to a word the minister said. I knelt with my hands clasped in prayer, even though I’d never prayed before, and begged for forgiveness. I begged for Danny to come home. I averted my gaze from the polished casket near the altar. It wasn’t Danny in there. Not my Danny. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t have left me. Not really. It was all some huge mistake.
After the service, Dad tucked my hand in his and we walked to the cemetery. More words were spoken. Words I didn’t understand or care about. Danny’s casket was lowered into the ground. Dad was the first person to throw a handful of dirt in after.
I almost yelled at him. He couldn’t bury Danny alive. Danny was in there, screaming, waiting for someone to open the lid and let him out. I dashed to the edge of the hole, causing more dirt to cascade onto the coffin, and cried. I begged him to come out. I begged him to get up. I begged him to forgive me until my voice went hoarse and Dad dragged me away.
I don’t know whether it was the right decision to go to his funeral. It didn’t make anything final for me. It didn’t bring closure. How could I possibly go on without him?
Chapter 1
Now
I made a wish as a shooting star streaked across the sky, leaving a magical trail of green before disappearing behind a cloud.
“Did you see that?” Dad asked, pulling his eye away from the telescope and taking a swig of his beer.
“Yep. First one of the summer.” It was our tradition. Every year, Dad, Danny and I would stay up late on the first night of the summer vacation, but it’s just Dad and me now. We hung out on the worn back porch and counted how many shooting stars we could see. There were so many glittering lights in the sky that the wishes usually lasted me until the following summer.
Tonight, I wished for something to take away the aching sadness.
“Name?” Dad asked.
I thought for a moment. We named each one too. “Annabel.”
“Like your old doll?”
“I never played with dolls.”
“Uh-huh.” He attempted to hide his grin behind another swig of beer.
I nudged his ribs. “Whatever.”
Dad looked through the telescope again while I listened to the cicadas chirp in the backyard. They were the sound of summer. The time of year when the days were sticky with heat and the evenings brought a cooling ocean breeze; tourists swarmed the beaches, ice creams were eaten, and ocean clean-ups were organized. It was my favorite part of the year.
“Might be a storm coming.” Dad’s husky voice softened with worry. Danny died in a storm three years ago. Since then, whenever one hit the coastline, he and Mom stayed up the whole night and watched old black and white movies to wait it out.
I turned in a slow circle, listening to the distant waves. Regular and rhythmical, the hypnotizing whisper lulled me into a stupor. There were no signs of a storm, but I’d learned not to question Dad’s judgment. “When?”
He pulled his eye away from the scope and rubbed at the stubble on his jaw.
“Dad?”
The cicadas fell silent. The breeze turned non-existent. A shiver coasted across the top of my shoulders.
“Not sure,” he finally said. “Could be the Santa Anas coming in. Unusual for this time of year, but not unheard of.”
Rubbing goosebumps on my bare legs, I zipped my sweatshirt higher and scanned the amassing clouds. “They look green.”
“What do?” Dad put his beer on the table and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“The clouds.” I grabbed his battered binoculars from the table. He still had them from his Navy days. I focused in on the distant clouds. Definitely a hint of green. Wicked witch green. “Do you think it could be because of the trash island?”
“I don’t think a trash island halfway to Hawaii could be responsible for turning the clouds green,” Dad replied.
“Didn’t you hear? The Eastern Garbage Patch is no longer halfway to Hawaii. Well, at least part of it isn’t. A large chunk broke off and it’s moving this way fast. I bet we see it off the coast before the summer is over.” My chest tightened. San Diego was home to a wealth of sea life and if the Eastern Garbage Patch arrived, much of it would be in jeopardy.
“God, I hope not.” Dad frowned. “If it really is that close… no one’s going to want to go sailing near it.”
Dad had a sailing business to worry about.
“I’m hoping we’ll get some clarity at the press conference tomorrow.” I slumped into Dad’s favorite deckchair. The bold stripes had long since faded into one murky color and the fabric smelled mildly of beer.
“Press conference or protest?” Dad asked. “I’m not sure how I feel about this activist stuff.”
“I’m not an activist! Jeez, just because I care about the environment does not make me some crazy, chain-myself-to-a-tree kind of person.”
Danny introduced me to ocean clean-up when we found a seal tangled in trash. I was too young to join the local organization, Green Clean, at the time, much to my annoyance. I waited until my twelfth birthday, signed up that day, and dragged Danny to the beach and made him show me everything. We combed the shore for trash until the sun set. Since his death, my parents were happy for me to honor his memory by doing something practical. Now I couldn’t not help. Not only did it bring me closer to Danny, but I was fueled by an unquashable desire to rescue as many sea creatures as I could from ocean trash.
“I know, Sara.” Dad raised his beer bottle in a toast. “I just want you to be careful.”
“The CEO of EnRG will be there. Did you know their cans and bottles make up thirty percent of that trash island? EnRG has a lot to answer for—”
“I think they’ve answered all they need to,” Dad said gently, running his hand along the porch railing. “It’s been three years, sweetheart.”
“But they can’t keep getting away with it.” I dug my fingernails into the wood of the armrests to redirect some of the energy from my emotions. “Don’t you care about what happened to Danny?”
Dad’s lower lip trembled. He reached out, but his hand floated back to his side. “Of course, I care. But putting all my energy into hating EnRG isn’t going to bring him back.”
I dipped my chin and ignored the solid lump in my throat. “I just… I wish I could… I just miss him.”
“Oh, Sara…” His lips twisted into the sympathetic look I hated. The one that made me feel weak and trapped and incapable of moving forward. “There are things you can change and things you can’t. You need to accept the things you can’t change. For your own sanity, sweetheart.”
“How am I supposed to change how I feel?” I spent hours wishing away my misery. “I can’t just turn off my emotions, not while EnRG is still out there making their stupid drink and putting their stupid trash in the ocean.”
“Sara, honey, Danny’s death was an accident. You can’t blame EnRG. It’s consumers who put the trash in the wrong places.”
I glared at him. “An accident which could have been avoided.”
It was EnRG’s fault. It was the bright, orange plastic wrapping they used for packaging and distribution that was to blame. The company was one of the last ones to move on to more biodegradable packaging methods. Some of it collected in the murky depths of Manta Ray Bay. It had tangled with Danny’s dive gear and held him down while he was diving until he ran out of air.
EnRG had killed Danny.
The irony was he’d never touched a drop of it. He was dedicated to his fitness and the whole “my body is a temple” routine; he would never have contaminated himself by drinking it.
But it still killed him.
Dad touched my shoulder. All the fight sagged out of me. We had talked about this before, but it never made me feel better. I couldn’t get past his death, couldn’t get used to him not being here, not here encouraging me, not here teasing me.
“Go for it, Sara,” Danny always said, with a swing of his arm and a triumphant grin. “You can do anything you set your mind to.”
I used to take it literally. One time I tried to fly off the roof of the house with a golf umbrella, a dusty old thing I found in the garage with a couple of bent spokes. I broke my wrist. Danny had decorated the cast with cool logos and hashtags like #getbettersoon, #operationbravesara, #projectstupid and #humanscantfly. Now I was old enough to know better. It took more than one person to rid the world of all its ocean trash, to save the turtles and seals and dolphins and all the other marine creatures I loved. I couldn’t do it on my own. That’s why I joined Green Clean. Although they had sponsorship from local companies and made some money by opening their rescue aquarium to the public, they relied on volunteers like me to help. To help the planet. And maybe myself. For Danny.
Clouds drifted across the sky, sometimes masking the stars, but they moved on quickly. I wondered what it would feel like to wrap myself around a star, to never feel darkness.
“Maybe you should have spent some time with Tyler tonight rather than hanging out with your old man.” Dad gave my shoulder a squeeze.
“Yeah, well…” I looked at my bare feet, at the cheap polish already flaking off my toenails. Harper had painted them only two days ago.
Dad took a slow swig of his beer and put the bottle on the table carefully. “What did you do?”
I winced. “Think I might have screwed up a bit.”
Dad echoed my wince. “Want to tell your very-cool-and-in-touch-with-teenagers Dad about it? I remember being a teen. I might be able to help.”
I clutched the armrests. “I didn’t watch him do his first loop-de-loop. He’s mad at me.”
Dad frowned. “And you didn’t go because…?”
“Because I was rescuing a turtle from a six-pack ring and had to take it to Green Clean’s recovery site. Then it was too late.”
I hoped the dark would hide the flush crawling up my neck. The cicadas came back to life, and a toying breeze returned to tease my hair.
Dad leaned against the wall of the house, his ankles crossed casually. “Sara, you do know you’re not the only Green Clean volunteer, right?”
“I know. I do…” Standing, I went to the handrail where a string of fairy lights cast the porch in soothing hues. Their soft colors threw rainbows over the dried grass and my baggy white T-shirt. The lights used to hang over the headboard of my bed, but just before Danny died, I decided I could sleep without a nightlight and relegated them to the backyard.
“But it was hidden in a pile of crap and hard to find. Others might not have noticed. I’ve got a good eye for these things. I couldn’t leave it there…”
“I’m sure Tyler will understand,” Dad said. “But, Sara? You don’t have to tackle the world on your own.”
“I know.”
I spotted another shooting star and made a private wish. About hopes and losses and turning back time. I named it Danny 5798.
“Do you?”
I sighed and kicked at some displaced sand on the porch with my bare foot, managing to catch a splinter in my big toe. I winced and gritted my teeth against the pinch of pain.
“I think so,” I muttered.
“Oh, Sara.” Dad hugged me.
I stood stiff for a moment, worried the level of affection would push my guard down, afraid it would make me feel unprepared for all the things I had to face. Every day I battled against grief. By keeping my shoulders high, my guard up, my jaw clenched, my hands fisted. I stacked up hours at Green Clean in Danny’s name. A penance. A duty. A labor of love. Small gestures of affection tended to send my flimsy walls of protection crumbling to the ground. Then I’d have to start building them up again. And that could take hours. Days.
Would I always feel so broken?
“That’s better,” Dad said.
Stepping away from the hug, I shrugged off the rising emotion. The fragility that hovered a whisper away. The scent of rosemary and mint reached me from Mom’s herb planter near the back step, mingled with the salty air rolling in from the ocean. Familiar smells. Comforting smells. Smells I drank in to distract myself.
Dad examined my face. “Sara, you know you could—”
“Can we talk about something else?” I bent and yanked the splinter out of my toe. A pinprick of blood formed on my skin.
“Sure.” Dad patted my arm, but I felt him wanting to say something more.
I hid behind the binoculars and watched the sky. It was still green. Even I didn’t think a trash island could turn a sky green. Maybe it was a storm, but I didn’t feel much of a wind and the waves had been pretty calm all day. Although it could all change in an instant. Danny had understood that.
“It’s so beautiful out here,” Dad said, sweeping his gaze around our small backyard and over the fence to the ocean beyond. “I don’t think I could ever get bored of the beach, the ocean, the sky.”
“Me neither.”
Living two blocks from Manta Ray Marina and a mile from the cliffs overlooking Almond Cove, the air was always filled with the scent of the ocean. The scent of home. I was never entirely happy until part of my body was immersed in the ocean, and I always longed to feel its cold embrace when I was away from it. If Mom and Dad ever wanted to move inland, I would have to stage a protest.
I refocused the binoculars. “Maybe it’s cover for the alien mothership observing Earth.” I glanced at him long enough to see him smile. “Do you believe in aliens, Dad?”
“Of course.”
“Of course?”
Shrugging a shoulder, he leaned back against the table. “It’s just a matter of statistics. The universe is infinite. We can’t be the only planet with intelligent life.”
“Ah, so it’s not something you know for sure.”
Dad flicked my nose. “How many times do I need to tell you, when I was in the Navy, there was no X-Files department.”
Dad left the Navy after Danny died. Mom wasn’t willing to risk losing another member of our family, so he bought a boat with Danny’s insurance money and now taught rich execs how to sail.
“Ha. That’s what you say. You weren’t just Navy, you were a SEAL. I bet you know loads of secret stuff.” The green in the clouds deepened fractionally, then seemed to extend to the ocean below. With the moon obliterated by the encroaching clouds, it was hard to tell the source of the strange green tinge. Sky, or ocean? I frowned. The cicadas ratcheted up, their noise level causing both Dad and I to glance at the dark backyard.
Dad raised both brows. “Someone’s horny.”
“Dad!” A laugh burst from my lips, releasing some of my pent-up tension.
“Alien cicadas wanting to get their jiggy on with their three penises? Oh, maybe they have three assholes too—.”
“Swear jar!”
As soon as I finished speaking, the cicadas fell quiet once more. Completely quiet. And it had sounded like there were hundreds of them.
“Weird,” I said.
“Probably the heatwave.”
“But what is that green stuff out there?” I handed him the binoculars.
Dad stared through the binoculars. He scratched his head. Rubbed the back of his neck. The cicadas remained quiet the entire time. After a couple minutes, he lowered the binoculars. “Storm’s coming. I hope it passes quickly. We’ve got a group of new sales recruits coming on the boat next week.”
I groaned. “Don’t make me cook for a bunch of swanky executives.” Probably the same rich execs who worked for EnRG, but I quashed my urge to mention the company again.
“Nah. I need you as my first mate. We’ll pack them a champagne picnic and leave it at that.”
“Only if I can have a glass.”
Dad chuckled. “We’ll see.”
“Did you order those steel straws I sent you the link for?”
Even though I wasn’t looking at his face, my attention was on the faint green light pulsating from beyond the waves, I could sense his silent laughter. “I will.”
“Dad!”
“I will, Sara. Don’t you worry. I always click on the links you send me.”
“Good, you can have a medal and a cape.”
“As long as the cape is blue. That’s my best color.” Laughing, he grabbed his beer and drained the last dribble. “We should hit the hay. We’ve got a busy day on the boat tomorrow.”
“Did Mom call?”
Dad slid the back door open, breaking the quiet of the night. A dog barked in the distance. The faint aroma of home wafted out of the open door; old leather and clean carpet mixed with something pleasantly musky and the vegetarian chili we had with our nachos for dinner.
He checked his watch as he stepped into the house. “Earlier. She’s having fun with her friends.”
“You’re joining her the day after tomorrow, right?”
Closing the door behind me, Dad thumbed the lock. The small print of a single rowboat battling a stormy sea wobbled on a loose screw. It was the only painting in the galley kitchen. But the corkboard over the table was filled with family snapshots. The ones of Danny were hidden under more recent photos. No one could bear to take them down, but no one could bear to look at them either, and so they were buried under more recent snaps of the beach and sailing and Green Clean and all the other stuff that filled our lives.
“Yep. At the end of her trip with the girls.”
Mom had taken off on a trip around Europe with her three closest friends from high school and had been gone two weeks already. Something she’d been saving up to do for a long time. It was a trip she had put on hold when Danny died.
Dad touched my shoulder. “You’ll only be on your own for three days. And Harper is coming to stay, right?”
I nodded. “We’re planning on having a three-day rave. Booze, drugs, boys. You know. Might as well go big.”
“Ha, ha!” Dad clutched his stomach in fake amusement. “Don’t you dare. I’d like the house to be intact when I get back.”
“I promise.” I showed him my crossed fingers before I stuck them behind my back.
Chuckling, he rolled his eyes. “Well, make sure you tidy up before we get home.”
I smirked. “Right at the end. I want to enjoy three days of leaving my clothes on the floor and the dishes in the sink.”
“Ha! And don’t forget your boat chores.”
After we said goodnight, I tiptoed into the small bathroom on the landing and brushed my teeth. Looking out the window, I watched the dark ocean. I searched for the green tinge in the clouds and water. In the distance, I could make out a pulsing green light, so faint it could have been my imagination. No matter how hard I stared, it didn’t get stronger or weaker, so I gave up on straining my eyes and finished my nighttime routine.
In my bedroom, I opened my window so the soothing sound of breaking surf could lull me to sleep. I found it impossible to sleep without it. I checked my phone where it lay charging on my bedside table. After scrolling through Instagram and reading about the fires up the coast and liking half a dozen photos of baby seals, I found a new e-mail from Mom. They’d visited the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame and l’Arc de Triomphe all in one day. Tomorrow they had booked to go to the catacombs. It sounded creepy. An attachment showed a photo of her in front of the Eiffel Tower with her three girlfriends, all sticking bunny ears behind each other’s heads. I sent back a quick email, telling her I missed her.
There weren’t any messages from Tyler. My heart sank. I must have really hurt him this time. But there would be plenty of time for me to watch him perform tricks in his two-seater airplane. I hoped he would come around about the turtle.
I got into bed and fussed with the duvet, trying to get comfortable. Grabbing a skimming pebble from my bedside table, I rubbed my thumb over its smooth surface. Danny had given it to me. I remembered the day perfectly.
*
Danny plucked a pebble from the beach, held it in his hand, then threw it toward the water. I watched it jump. Once, twice… five times, before disappearing under the calm surface.
“Just like that,” he said.
I gave him my best scowl. “That’s what I’ve been doing, and I still can’t make it jump. And I thought you said it was easier to do it on a lake.”
“It is, but the ocean’s so calm today it’s just like a lake.” He sifted through the sand and plucked another pebble from the ground. He offered it to me. “Come on, squirt. You can do it, give it your best shot.”
I couldn’t see his face with the sun lowering behind his head, but I sensed his smile. It was enough to motivate me. Ignoring the mouth-watering scent of cooking hot dogs from the boardwalk, I snatched the pebble from his hand and squared my shoulders to the water.
Danny placed his hands on my shoulders and whispered into my ear, “One flick of your wrist.”
Gritting my teeth, I threw the pebble. It didn’t jump once. Just sank through the water with barely a splash. “I’m never going to get this.”
“You will, squirt, I promise. We’re not going to leave this beach until you’ve skimmed your first pebble.”
“I have to go to bed at eight-thirty,” I replied.
“You can stay up later, all night, if it takes that long. Like the first night of the summer vacation when we look for shooting stars.”
I grinned but prayed it wouldn’t take too much longer. I was already getting tired.
Danny held my wrist, mimicked the throwing motion. We practiced a few times with no pebble, then he found me the “perfect specimen.” It was a large, cumbersome shape, and I was sure it would sink straight to the bottom of the ocean.
I took a breath, held it in my lungs, forcing my body and mind to be still. Then I flicked my wrist like Danny had shown me. The pebble flew toward the water, glinting in the sun. It disappeared with a splash and I kicked at the sand, but then it arced out of the water into the air, across the smooth surface, and bounced three more times. I jumped up and down and roared into the breeze. “Yes! I did it!”
“I told you, you could.”
I hugged him. “You are the best brother ever!”
“Sara Monroe, pebble skipping master. My little sister, ladies and gentlemen. Sara, take a bow.”
Beaming, I faced the water and took my bow, throwing in a wobbly curtsey for good measure. Danny picked me up and whirled me around before dumping me in the water. The shock of the cold made my teeth chatter, but after a few seconds, the gentle waves lulled me deeper and I ducked under the surface and swam like a dolphin. Danny joined me, throwing me high, catching me in the air. Waves smashed our legs and salt stung my skin, but I loved every minute of it.
Before we left the beach, Danny found me another perfect skimming pebble. But I didn’t throw it; I carried it home and put it on my bedside table. A memento of the day. I could never bring myself to throw it.
